Whether an engine can name you is decided before anyone asks.

Google says there are no special requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode: a page has to be indexed and eligible to show with a snippet. OpenAI says a site that opts out of OAI-SearchBot won't be shown in ChatGPT's search answers. Most of this work is the groundwork done completely, and the failures we find are ordinary ones. Southern Belle Construction's old WordPress site blocked the AI crawlers outright. Paich Tax's old builder site had no structured data and no llms.txt, and when we first asked about her by name, three of five engines described a different firm in another town.

So the program has two halves. The engineering: crawler access, one identity for the business across the web, a schema graph on every page, answers written so a passage can be quoted on its own. The measurement: the same fixed questions put to five engines from the business's own location, every question asked more than once, read for whether you were named, whether your site was read and who was named instead. Every number we report carries the date it was taken.